In other news, I am not doing well at all. If you want to help me make rent so there’s one less thing causing panic attacks, I would be eternally grateful. You can donate here:

I may be taking the next couple of days off from ETEV, due to major upheavals at home, plus B and I going out job hunting, and having exceeded my ability to handle shit without medication. Please do follow me on Facebook (most of my stuff is public, so you can see and share even if we’re not formally friends). With the Chitler regime doing something else appalling every half hour, it’s about the only place where I can even try to keep up. Plus, you’ll get lots of pictures of a very elderly felid. She is just over a month away from her 23rd birthday! Continue reading “New at Rosetta Stones: How to Save Public Education”→

United States volcanoes sure have been busy grabbing our attention this spring! Both Mount St. Helens and Mount Hood have experienced earthquake swarms (which, darn it, is completely normal activity and not a sign of imminent eruptions). Kilauea had some exciting new lava breakouts recently. And Mauna Loa just got bumped from normal to advisory status due to an increase in seismic activity (although it’s not quite signalling an eruption – yet).

These volcanoes are quite different from each other, but they share two things in common: they’re pretty popular, and their eruptions can have some pretty serious effects on urban areas.

You may have these or other volcanoes as neighbors. It pays to be aware of what they’re up to and what they’re capable of. You’ll definitely want a plan for coping with any of their shenanigans! So here are six easy steps all of us living near active or potentially-active volcanoes can follow to keep safe and happy. Continue reading “Dealing With Volcanoes in 6 Easy Steps”→

My wise and angry friend A.M. has made it easy for those of you whose Senator voted yes to contact them and register your anger. Let them know that their continued employment depends on them doing their jobs and opposing Trump’s appalling appointees.

Not long after Badlands was brought into line, anonymous employees of the NPS went rogue. They created the AltUSNatlParkService account and, after retweeting a particularly provocative image from the Badlands account along with some climate change data, announced their intent in no uncertain terms:

Before I begin talking about alternatives to literally punching Nazis, I just want to state for the record that I am 100% in favor of punching Nazis. We tried using our words, and all they’ve done is allowed the mealy-mouthed quisling center to bloviate at us about “going high when they go low,” as if punching someone who is advocating for genocide is actually the greater of two evils. (Newsflash: it is not.)

We used our words, and continue to use our words, and what we have ended up with is Nazis in the state houses, Nazis on school boards, Nazis on Capitol Hill, and Nazis in the White House. We now have a Nazi puppet dancing on their strings in the Oval Office. We have Nazis everywhere, advocating state violence and white supremacy and ethnic cleansing. I don’t think words alone are enough.

I am here for the anti-fascists who’ve made it their mission to stop Nazi violence with violence. I’m generally a pacifist, but when people are already hurting and killing us, I really have no problem with meeting their violence with necessary force.

I am here for self-defense. Sometimes, the best self-defense is to throw the first punch.

However. Not all of us can punch Nazis.

I, for instance, cannot punch Nazis. I haven’t any upper body strength. Also, I don’t get out much. I mean, if it comes to it, I could throw some elbows, and I do plan to wear boots more often in case any Nazi-stomping becomes necessary, but I am not really built or trained for physical confrontation.

I think that where Trump and Hitler really diverge from each other is in their sincerity. Trump has always been a con man and a reality show personality. There’s no doubt he’s a bigot and a racist, not to mention a complete misogynist, but those things weren’t tied to his political ambition from the beginning. In fact, he seems to have pursued politics only to revive his failing brand. And the outrageous shit he spews on an hourly basis is calculated to pander, to shock, to get people buzzing. He’s discovered it’s very easy to get his ego fed to bursting by being the most “politically incorrect” politician possible. He hasn’t spent his life dreaming of Muslim registries and letting the religious right overthrow our Constitutional rights. These just happen to be a few of the things that get people sleazy enough to follow him excited, so he pushes them.

Hitler, on the other hand, pursued political power early on. And from the start, he intended to slaughter as many Jews as he could manage.

“Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews.”

This is a goal Hitler never lost sight of even when circumstances forced him to dial down his overt antisemitism. But when whipping up his followers, he knew hate sells. He used it freely. He spent years blaming all of Germany’s woes on Jewish people. And Germany, defeated and humiliated in the first World War, had plenty of woes. They were far worse off than we are. Desperate people need scapegoats; Hitler offered them up.

Hitler shouldn’t have been around to provide them. After fomenting hatred of the Jews for several years, he made a premature attempt at revolution that ended with him facing high treason charges. He should have been tossed in prison for life or deported. But he figured out what he needed to say in order to gain the court’s sympathies. He learned that with people outside the Nazi party, it was best to dial back the rabid bigotry and appeal to ethnic pride.

Over the next six weeks, Hitler, the uncouth agitator, remade himself into an innocent patriot who had been betrayed by a democracy too weak to defend Germanic honor…. Hitler transformed his public self from a raging antisemite into a resolute tribune of the Volk who captivated audiences with his vision of “cleanliness everywhere, cleanliness of our government, cleanliness in public life, and also this cleanliness in our culture… that will restore our [national] soul to us.”

Of course, “cleanliness” meant purging the Jewish people, but he wasn’t so crude as to actually say that in front of non-Nazis whose esteem he had to win. Instead, he attacked more widely despised and impersonal things: the Versailles Treaty, Bolshevism, and liberals. He cast himself as the doughty patriot willing to sacrifice anything to protect his beloved volk. He sprinkled in appeals to Germany’s proud military past, and finished with an appeal to “the goddess of the eternal tribunal of history.”

He’d found all the right buttons to push. And so, instead of spending the rest of his life moldering in a Bavarian prison or thrown out of Germany with no hope of returning, he received a mere slap on the wrist: five years in prison without subsequent deportation.

So what are we seeing? That a clever fascist will tailor his appeals to his audience. All it takes to rally nascent fascists who won’t respond to overt bigotry and racism is an appeal to be the hero fighting those things they abhor: liberals, socialists, Marxists, and other assorted lefties. Sprinkle in a hefty dose of national, ethnic, and military pride, and you can get conservatives to bless even outright treason.

Sound familiar? It should. Trump is far cruder, but he plays the tune Hitler wrote. Not surprising, considering how much he reportedly admires the genocidal shit.

We’ll see next how Hitler reassured his followers that yes, he still hated Jews. It’s a reminder to never take Trump at his word when he dials back his hatred to pander to less hateful audiences.

We’re studying The Nazi Conscience as a way to prepare for what’s happening now. If you want to read along, you can pick up an inexpensive used copy at Amazon. Buying through that link also supports my blogging, so thank you!

Here’s how to deal with the fact that a great orange buffoon is getting sworn into our highest office: go see Hidden Figures. Just go. Go see black women fighting misogyny and racism and Jim Crow while doing badass math. You need to see that right now.

*This review is mostly spoiler-free*

Take your children to go see it. Yes, even the young ones. Yes, even the teens. Look: I was in a theater full of little kids and teenagers, and they were sitting there beside unrelated adults up to the age of probably-watched-John-Glenn-orbit-live-on-teevee-with-their-own-kids, and apparently they were all riveted. I have never been to a movie that full of young folk who were so extraordinarily quiet. I’ve never been in an auditorium packed with nearly 400 people of all ages and had such an uninterrupted experience. The kids will do fine, and they need to see this.

Hollywood put out a movie about black women doing math, and it was spellbinding. I never thought they’d try. And since they tried, I never thought they’d do it with so much math and so few explosions. They had exploding rockets, but seemed almost embarrassed to mention them. There was a love story, but only because one of the real women this movie is based on actually got married in the middle of our race to space. It wasn’t shoved in just to hook our emotions, and you get the feeling they’d rather be doing more math. The movie stayed remarkably true to actual, historical events.

You’ll get to meet three of the most extraordinary women in our country’s scientific history: Katherine Goble (later Johnson), Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson. You will get to see them be math nerds. You will get to see them have interests other than marriage and children. Hell, you’ll even get to see one of them fix a car. In a dress. Did you know women could fix cars while wearing dresses? Well, now you do.

You’ll get to see three black women star in their own story, as heroes, not as sidekicks and inspirations to white people. This wasn’t a story about white people learning how not to be racist gits (although several white people learned this, the movie isn’t about them). This wasn’t a story about three career women trying to also balance their roles as wives and mothers (although they were). This wasn’t a story about men learning how to deal with career women, women smarter than them, and figuring out how not to be sexist gits (although this all happens).

It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the day on which far too many people vigorously whitewash a great social justice warrior’s legacy. See, we all know he was a good man, even a great man. We all know that opposing him shows you’re a disgusting, bigoted asshole. But he’s no good for the status quo warriors unless he’s been cherry-picked to oblivion.

They try to pull his fangs, folks, and then they demand we be more like their false idol of him. Fuck that.

Firstly, read the entirety of his Letter from a Birmingham Jail to see how he dealt with the don’t-let’s-rock-the-boat allies and the status quo warriors. If you don’t think he’d have been out there blocking freeways with Black Lives Matter activists and making the comfortable very uncomfortable indeed, you haven’t heard a word this man has actually said.

Secondly, here’s a selection of quotes that should leave you in no doubt that non-violent didn’t mean non-confrontational. His insistence on love didn’t mean asking the oppressors quietly and respectfully to please if it isn’t too much trouble to maybe consider stop oppressing people. He was out there making the comfortable damned uncomfortable. He was there to confront, not conciliate. He demanded justice. And he kept demanding, even though many people wanted him to just STFU. Listen: Continue reading “Martin Luther King Would’ve Been Resisting the Shit Out of the New Regime”→